We already know that climate change is responsible for every hot day, cold day, rainfall, drought, hurricane, famine, and war.

Literally none of these things existed prior to the burning of fossil fuels, and once we return to a primitive form of existence or invent a miracle form of energy based upon James Cameron’s Unobtainium or something similar all these evils will merely be memories.

The Washington Post adding another bad thing onto the list of crimes committed by the oil companies and all capitalists: domestic violence.

Who knew? I assumed that domestic violence was caused by family members behaving very badly, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, and the long list of social ills we all mistakenly attributed it to. But it turns out that CO2 is the root cause.

Until recently, relatively little attention has been paid to its disproportionate impact on women and girls. But this year the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identified a link between climate change and violence, citing the growing evidence that extreme weather events are driving domestic violence, with global implications for public health and gender equality.

A 2021 study of extreme weather events in Kenya by researchers at St. Catherine University in Minnesota found the economic stresses caused by flooding and drought or extreme heat exacerbated violence against women in their homes. The research, which used satellite and national health survey data, showed that domestic violence rose by 60 percent in areas that experienced extreme weather.

That analysis, and 40 others published this year as part of a global review in the journal The Lancet, found a rise in gender-based violence during or after extreme weather events.

Since the research was done in Kenya, I think we can safely assume that racism and colonialism are similarly implicated. If not, we can throw them into the hopper as potential causes of the rise in domestic violence anyway. Racism and colonialism are always good targets for explaining bad things.  (St Kates, by the way, is not exactly known as a serious research university).

On its face this “research” has problems, being about as useless as linking COVID vaccines to car accidents. It is, in other words, pure crap, finding a correlation that is incredibly suspect.

First things first: do you, or anybody you know, trust statistics coming out of the 3rd world regarding anything? How are the stats collected? What is their reliability? For how long have they been collected? Is reporting of domestic violence incidents now more socially acceptable than in the past?

Second, the correlation between climate change and any particular weather event is completely spurious. For as long as human beings have existed we have suffered through droughts, floods, excessive heat, cold…whatever. One of the great spurs to develop technology and harvest energy is to reduce our vulnerability to natural variability. Living in Minnesota is almost impossible without access to vast quantities of energy, and the expansion of the US population into less pleasant climates such as the desert southwest was driven by the development of air conditioning.

California would have vastly fewer people without massive investments into water preservation and transportation, and the development of agriculture in the fertile crescent drove enormous projects to manipulate water resources. Without the use of technology and the consequent expansion in energy use the human population would be miniscule.

Lastly, let’s assume the absurdity that climate change has had some impact on domestic violence. In that case, would reducing CO2 emissions be the best way to fight domestic violence? Reworking the entire world economy to deal with domestic violence seems like a tremendously inefficient and ineffective way to address the problem. Wouldn’t it make sense to put your efforts into something a bit more targeted and less difficult to change than a $5 trillion/year climate policy that might possible have an impact in decades?

No, of course not. Because this is all blatant and ridiculous propaganda. The authors, if they actually cared a whit about women in the third world, would focus their efforts on more practical explanations for and solutions to the issues that plague them. We surrendered millions of Afghani women to the tender mercies of the Taliban. Should we reduce CO2 production in the US as a solution?

Anthropogenic climate change, even if you believe it to be a serious issue requiring great effort to address, is simply not the cause of every ill in the universe, and reversing course on CO2 emissions will have zero impact on most of the world’s ills. Wars, droughts, floods, domestic violence–all these ills preceded any modern climate change, and will continue whether the climate changes dramatically or not.

Make the case on its own merits. One of the reasons so many people distrust the “experts” on this issue, as with many others, is the willingness to distort the facts and invent reasons to implement unpopular policies that they nonetheless want.

In other words, quit lying.